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On the other side of the spectrum, AWS's extensive cost report metrics via tagging are great for big companies.

I can now show exactly which departments and dev teams are driving all the costs, and on what (CPU, storage, network). In a way that I never could for on-prem stuff.



...sure, as long as they tag their resources properly.

The closest I got to an org that did this well was a big company that ran Cloud Custodian in all their AWS accounts and if you launched an EC2 instance, it would terminate it immediately with extreme prejudice if it didn't have values for three required tags, one to identify the "owner" individually and two for accounting purposes.

The only problem with that is there's no mechanism to make sure that the values of the cost centers values were correct. There was a bit of a scandal when one group (who presumably just copied and pasted a bunch of CloudFormation from another group's repo) was running 5 figures a months of infrastructure under the other group's billing codes.

ALSO, as many have said, bandwidth is a big part of the cost, and at this time it's nearly impossible to do showback/chargeback on bandwidth. There may be a way to do it using Flow Logs by correlating IP addresses to instances and using those tags, but I've never heard of someone doing this successfully.


Egress charges leverage tags now. You can get down to good detail. Here's an image showing it will use tags if you set them: https://blog.cloudability.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/dat...

In this case, a service tag, set in some cases, not in others.


A better way than tagging is to give each team an AWS account to maintain and pay from their own budget.


Then you have to manage a million different AWS accounts. Each of them may be set up differently.


That’s what CloudFormation and Organizations are for....


You probably still want tags to break down costs by dev/test/prod, subsystem, etc. Or tags to aggregate them by department, customer, etc.


AWS cost reporting is far from great. Its hard to learn current(daily) charges; RI is completely hidden and only visible in the final bill, blended; there's no way to limit the spending and the detailed reports are in csv, not user-readable.


Yes, there aren't great AWS provided tools, but the data is there. We happen to use Cloudability, though I'm sure there are other good tools, maybe even free ones.


Can you elaborate on that or do you have any best-practices for tagging and correlating costs?


We use a commercial tool. But, the most important tags are environment (dev, test, prod), application name, app version, and owning team.

For some apps, perhaps a "component" or "service" tag would also be important.




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